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V. * 

SOCIAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION 

OF 

PHILADELPHIA. 



PAPERS OF 1875. 



SILK CULTURE AND HOME INDUSTRY. 

READ BEFORE THE ASSOCIATION APRIL 8th, 1875. 

By DR. SAML. CHAMBERLAINE. 



The following is a list of the Papers read before the Association : 

187 1. Compulsory Education. By Lorin Blodget. 
Arbitration as a Remedy for Strikes. By Eckley B. Coxe. 
The Revised Statutes of Pennsylvania. By R. C. McMurtrie. 
Local Taxation. By Thomas Cochran. 

Infant Mortality. By Dr. J. S. Parry. 

1872. Statute Law and Common Law, and the Proposed Revision in Penn- 

sylvania. By E. Spencer Miller. 
Apprenticeship. By James S. Whitney. 
The Proposed Amendments to the Constitution of Pennsylvania. By 

Francis Jordan. 
Vaccination. By Dr J. S. Parry. 
The Census. By Lorin Blodget. 

1873. The Tax System of Pennsylvania. By Cyrus Elder. 

The Work of the Constitutional Convention. By A. Sydney Biddle. 
What shall Philadelphia do with its Paupers ? By Dr. Ray. 
Proportional Representation. By S. Dana Horton. 
^Statistics Relating to the Births, Deaths, Marriages, etc., in Philadelphia. 
By John Stockton-Hough, M. D. 
On the Value of Original Scientific Research. By Dr. Ruschenberger. 
^On the Relative Influence of City and Country Life, on Morality, Health, 
Fecundity, Longevity and Mortality. By John Stockton-Hough, M. D. 

1874. vThe Public School System of Philadelphia. By James S. Whitney. 
vThe Utility of Government Geological Surveys. By Prof. J. P. Lesley. 

The Law of Partnership. By J. G. Rosengarten. 

Methods of Valuation of Real Estate for Taxation. By Thomas Cochran. 
•^/The Merits of Cremation. By Persifor Frazer, Jr. 
^Outlines of Penology. By Joseph R. Chandler. 

1875. Brain Disease, and Modern Living. Dr. Ray. 

Hygiene of the Eye, Considered with Reference to the Children in our 

Schools. By Dr. F. D. Castle. 
The Relative Morals of City and Country. By Wm. S. Peirce. 
^"Silh Culture and Home Industry. Dr. Saml. Chamberlaine. 



o 



v 



SILK CULTURE AND HOME INDUSTRY. 



THE domestic industry that belonged to the last century and 
to the early part of this nineteenth century has no longer 
any existence amongst us. In those days the cotton, flax and 
wool was raised by the father and his sons, and carded, spun and 
woven by the wife and daughters. The father boasted of the 
quantity he could raise ; the wife prided herself upon the excel- 
lence and beauty of her home manufacture. She supplied, with 
her own hand and her daughters' help, all the needs of her house- 
hold, and prepared, beforehand, for the anticipated wants of sons 
and daughters, when it should be their turn to enter upon the 
cares and duties of a family. In those days the spinning wheel 
was at hand in every household. Now it is only to be seen as a 
gilded sign over Milliken's linen store. Then it told of the home, 
of the American home, and of the English family traits that came 
to us from our Anglo-Saxon fathers \ it told of careful housewifery, 
of motherly supervision over the daughters, and of domestic labor 
carefully apportioned to the strength and capacity of each. The 
steam engine, with its tyranny of labor, was not then known, and 
the constant tread-mill demand for ten hours steady work had not 
been heard. It is only now, after the experience of two gener- 
ations, that we realize how the steam engine and the factory have 
destroyed home industry and our homes. In England this is in 
a measure perceived, and we find reports of an Anti-steam Asso- 
ciation, amongst whom steam-power is abjured ; all labor that is 
possible to human hands being committed to human hands, and 
no aid other than animal power is permitted, nor even this where 
man-power will suffice. Whether this is but the suggestion as yet 
of John Ruskin, or has been truly put into effect, the very sugges- 
tion proves that more work for human hands to do is the want of 
our times, and that an industry to occupy the time and attention 
of those who stay at home is the need for us. We need it to 
supplement the power of steam ; to produce yet more work for 



4 Silk Culture and Home Industry. 

steam power to do; to provide "the small things" for " the day 
of small things," while steam provides the great. 

There was, however, a time when the factory and the steam- 
power promised better things. Those were the days of the Lowell 
factory girl. We may not deny her the title of lady. She was 
refined, educated. She performed her daily work with skill and 
even elegance. She returned from her factory duties to read or 
to sing, or to play the harp or piano, and laid these aside to write 
for her Lowell journal. She maintained the character and refine- 
ment of a lady, while receiving her wages as a workwoman. She 
was not degraded by her work ; she elevated the work itself by 
the skill that her literature and education enabled her to throw 
into it. But the Lowell factory girl was a product of silk culture. 
Sixty years ago she gathered the mulberry leaves, fed the worms, 
cured the cocoons and reeled the silk at home ; and this she used 
herself or sold at the nearest store, often in the way of barter for 
family wants. The factory was erected. The wages were more 
than her home product ; they were sure and steady ; her worms 
might not be a success. Moreover it was money that she got, 
and this seemed better than bartering for goods. She ceased to 
raise silk, therefore ; suffered her stock of worms to die out and 
failed to renew the trees that by this time began to die of very age. 
The factories got all their silk from China, and she became the 
Lowell factory girl, to be supplanted in time by the ruder and 
coarser hired girl, who now performs her factory work ; for if we 
may believe a late report of the Massachusetts Labor Bureau, the 
Lowell factory girl, with her literature, and her music, and her 
journal, is a woman of a past age : she exists no more as such. 
The factory that withdrew her from her domestic industry at 
home has discarded her for the cheaper and ruder labor that does 
not " mingle the beautiful with the useful " \_ u miscuit utile dulci"]. 
But she no longer raises silk. The " ten, twenty, fifty or an hun- 
dred pounds " (Cobb, p. 128) that her mother or her grandmother 
produced, is no longer added to the comforts of the family, nor 
to the wealth of the State. The eight or nine thousand pounds 
that a single county of Connecticut produced in 1828 (Cobb) are 
brought from foreign countries (China or Japan) to the very 
mills in which she worked, and the labor of her father and her 
brothers is sent in the shape of hard-earned gold to pay for the 



Silk Culture and Home Industry. 5 

silk that she might have made and that her trees might have easily 
produced. 

Times have changed, and with times' changes have come great 
changes of fortune to us all. Especially since the great upturn- 
ing of our social condition by the war for slavery, have changes 
been wrought in the fortunes of many who had not thought to 
labor for a living. Still more, we are suffering from a stagnation 
of all trades and all business, so that even some who have property 
and possessions are yet suffering for want of income from these. 
We need, our country needs, we all need a new industry to set in 
motion the wheels of trade, to start anew the stagnant or sluggish 
circulation of money. We need, especially, a home industry ; 
something to occupy profitably the home hours of those who feel 
the need of money, yet are not able to enter the lists of labor and 
to contend with hand and arm against the brawny hands and 
arms that have been early used to labor. The raising of silk 
would supply this need. The labor is light, the expenses small, 
the apparatus required, none. A few boxes of pasteboard, in her 
own room, comprised the laboratory of a lady in Camden, who 
raised the worms and reeled the silk she required for her own use, 
and some pound or two beside that she offered to the silk weavers 
of the city. A single chamber 12 x 20 feet, with a line of shelves 
along the walls, enabled a lady in Elkton to raise the worms and 
make silk with so little of actual work, that her niece spoke of it, 
and of her own aid in the care of them, as a most happy period of 
her life. In the days of the great silk excitement (1835 to 1842) 
boys of ten to fifteen years gathered the leaves, fed the worms, 
reeled off the silk. Many of them, now men of age, speak with 
evident pleasure of that which was not indeed a labor to them, 
but rather a sport and a play. Yet, from Mr. Cobb's account, it 
was possible for the Connecticut families to add from $50 to $500 
to the family income from this light labor alone. As a remedy, 
therefore, for hard times ; as a means of alleviating the distress 
from changes of fortune ; as a mode of producing income that 
does not involve hard labor, nor contest with those who are inured 
to labor; and especially as a means of reviving the home industry 
that has departed with the advent of steam and of factory labor, 
silk culture recommends itself to our consideration, and that espe- 
cially at this time of general depression and stagnation of business. 



6 Silk Culture and Home Industry. 

Of the riches that flow from silk-culture it would seem scarcely 
necessary to speak. We all know that it is " the great and inex- 
haustible source of wealth to China' ' [Kendrick] ; that France 
" derives her power and resources mainly from this branch of her 
industry" [Cobb]; that to Italy, Austria, Turkey, it is an im- 
portant product; and to Japan scarcely less so than to China; 
while to the United States, with soil, climate and population ad- 
mirably suited to the culture, it is as yet unknown as a staple pro- 
duct, and is remembered only for the few spasmodic efforts that 
have been made to introduce it. A journal of 1870, \_The Ameri- 
can Exchange and Review for October, 1870,] gives the following 
list of silk-producing countries and their supposed annual revenue 
from raw silk : 



1. The Chinese Empire, $81,200,000 

2. Italy, 39,200,000 

3. France, 25,000,000 

4. India, 24,000,000 

5. Japan, 17,000,000 

6. Turkey, 7,000,000 

7. Asia Minor, 5,200,000 

8. Persia, 5,000,000 

9. Spain and Portugal,.. 3,200,000 



10. Syria $1,800,000 

11. Turkistan, 1,400,000 

12. Pontifical States, 1,300,000 

13. Austria, 1,280,000 

14. Greece, 840,000 

15. Turkistan, (China,)... 400,000 

16. Morocco, 300,000 

17. Corean Archipelago,.. 100,000 

18. America, 80,000 



Here we see America, which probably means the United States 
only (and from the date we should suppose California alone), is 
credited with the production to the amount of $80,000 only ; 
while China yields a thousand times as much, and Italy five hun- 
dred times; France and India, each three hundred times ; Japan, 
two hundred times ; and even the little Morea of Greece, scarcely 
largely than our State of Delaware (the whole of it not larger than 
Vermont), has ten times our product attributed to her. Although 
statistics are somewhat tedious to read and difficult to carry in 
mind, it may not be amiss to sum these up in such manner as to 
show the regions of the world in which silk is now being raised, 
and the great value of the product to these regions and their peo- 
ples. The value to 



(1.) China, is over $81,000,000 

(2.) Italy, and its near 

countries 46,000,000 



(3.) India, etc $44,000,000 

(4) France (alone) ... 25,000,000 

(5.) Japan (alone) 17,000,000 



Compared with these, our $80,000 seems but a very small drop 
in the great sea. But statistics do not give us so vivid ideas of 
the wealth produced as do some of the pictures presented to us by 



Silk Culture and Home Industry. 7 

the accounts from China ; as of the Venetian traveler, Marco Polo, 
who says that in his day "no fewer than 1,000 carriages and pack- 
horses, loaded with raw silk, made their daily entry into the city' ' 
— Cambalu, which he reports as the then name for the royal city. 
"Great, rich and crowded cities, filled with manufacturers of silk 
and merchandise, covered the whole extent of China." His re- 
port started Columbus on his voyage of discovery, and gave to 
Europe, not the silks of China, but the far greater wealth and the 
far greater capacities for silk, as well as for every other product, 
that our country is developing. 

The late Emperor of China, of whose decease we have just heard, 
was married about three years ago ; and we find in the Ledger of 
July 12th, 1872, that "the preparations for the marriage (of the 
Emperor of China), are being conducted on a scale of truly Ori- 
ental magnificence. An imperial edict requires one of the silk 
producing provinces to furnish for the occasion 3,350 pieces of 
silk-goods, 400 catties of silk-thread and embroidered velvet, 1,800 
pieces of fine cotton cloth, 4,800 pieces of brocaded cloth, 200 
pieces of plain green silk, and 2,000 silk articles of attire for the 
household and guard of the Empress elect : also 8,000 silk dresses 
and 800 pieces of plain silk, for the reserve wardrobe of the Im- 
perial body-guard; and 5,000 silk dresses and 500 pieces of plain 
green silk for the Imperial chair-bearers and escort. These are 
all to be supplied free of cost. The merchants upon whom these 
overwhelming honors have fallen, respectfully petition the Court 
that the distinction may be shared by other provicces of the 
Empire." 

Of the importance to France of her silk-product we form a bet- 
ter idea than statistics can give, from the effects produced a few 
years ago, when Louis Napoleon arranged a treaty of free-trade 
with England and removed the protective duties from silk. Bread" 
riots immediately ensued throughout the silk-producing provinces. 
It became necessary to send the military against the citizens, and 
to renew the duties, before quiet could be restored. 

There is absolutely nothing to forbid the culture of silk in the 
United States. Only the will to do it, and the wisdom to prepare 
the way for it, is wanted. It has actually been produced at some time, 
during our century of existence, in nearly every State of the Union. 
The product has always been of the best ; not merely equal to, but 



8 Silk Culture and Home Industry. 

pronounced superior, to that produced elsewhere. It is even now 
being produced in several of our States, and far more extensively 
than the public seems to know ; although for the most part it is 
being raised for amusement or for private use, or as a matter of 
curiosity, rather than for profit. The Germans in New Jersey are 
raising it ; individuals in Pennsylvania ; a silk manufacturer in 
Kansas ; a company in Louisiana ; others, in company or as indi- 
viduals, in California, are raising it — some of these raise and export 
the eggs only, and find profit in them. Others have undertaken 
to prepare the cocoons so that they could be reduced to a compact 
mass and so exported. Others again have reeled and prepared the 
silk for the weavers. A gentleman from Beaufort, in South Caro- 
lina, brought a specimen of silk raised and reeled under his direc- 
tion to this city two years ago : it was pronounced by the silk- 
weavers here to be of excellent quality : they told him that such 
silk would bring the highest price at which it could then be sold ; 
that they would give him $ 1 3. 50 for all he could make of such silk, the 
average price of all qualities being then about $6 per lb. We find 
from the several treatises on silk that every State on the Atlantic 
Coast from Maine to Florida, and those on the Gulf of Mexico, 
also (of the formerly called Western States,) Indiana, Illinois, Mis- 
souri, have all raised it at some period. Ohio went into the cul- 
ture quite largely, and in i860 reported 7,394 pounds, according to 
the Census Bureau. This is more than twice the quantity reported 
by California for the census of 1870, in which nine other States also 
report raw silk, from the one pound of Pennsylvania to the 153 
pounds of the State of Tennessee. It is plain from these facts that 
neither climate nor soil forbids the culture. That which has actu- 
ally been done, and done in the best manner, producing a market- 
able article equal or superior to the best foreign product, can be 
done again ; and without doubt will be done again, when circum- 
stances are such as to favor the doing it with profit to all concerned. 
Why did the silk-culture fail in 1840? is the question invariably 
asked when this subject is introduced. The remembrance of the 
great morus multicaulis mania and the subsequent financial em- 
barrassment, seems to be lasting beyond that of all other panics. 
Men do not refer to the oil-fever, nor to the Black-Friday in 
gold, with any thing like the same warmth with which they speak 
of multicaulis and silk culture. They do not refuse to deal in 



Silk Culture and Home Industry. g 

oil, nor to buy and sell gold, because of those disasters. Perhaps 
if the trees remained to us, as the oil and the gold remain, for other 
operations, there would not be the same horror of multicaulis, as 
though it alone were to blame. But the madness of planting, as 
they were recklessly planted, was exceeded by the madness with 
which the trees were uprooted and destroyed. Our fathers seem 
to have wreaked their vengeance upon the innocent trees for the 
disappointments of fortune they endured. They tore them up, 
carted them out, burned them, and killed every root or sprout 
they could find. In regions where the multicaulis covered acre 
after acre for miles, there is not now a tree to be found ; or if here 
and there one remains, it is but the decayed or decaying stump of 
the former tree. With all the extensive planting between 1835 
and 1842, there was no provision made for permanence of the 
trees ; and consequently none for permanent silk culture. When 
the failure came, the ground that had been devoted to growing 
young trees was needed for remunerative crops ; and no one 
thought of preserving the now unsaleable switches by planting 
them in hedge-rows or in their gardens or their yards. But with- 
out the trees there can be no silk. For two hundred years the 
silk culture of Italy could not cross the Alps, because the trees were 
not in France, and there was no one to plant them. At the end 
of that time (in 1564), a gardener, Traucat by name, "laid the foun- 
dation of a most extensive nursery of white mulberry trees, from 
whence the whole Southern provinces of France became covered 
with plantations." [Kendrick.] It is so with us. The presence 
of the trees in great abundance and in easily accessible locations, 
is absolutely necessary to the production of silk. 

The reply then to the question, "Why silk culture failed?" is 
that the trees were not preserved, and that they are not now to 
be found in any convenient locality. There was however a suc- 
cess, arising from the multicaulis fever, that redeems it from the 
charge of failure. Out of it arose the great silk-weaving industry 
that now employs more than $i5,ooo ; ooo of capital, produces an- 
nually $25,000,000 of silk goods, pays nearly $5,000,000 in wages, 
and gives work to about 12,000 persons [statistics from Am. Text. 
Manuf. for Oct. 1873J. O ut °f ^ arose the silk-weaving city of 
Paterson, New Jersey. Out of it have come the "147 silk weav- 
ing establishments in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Mary- 



io Silk Culture and Home Industry. 

land, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont" 
[as above]. If we are reconciled to the losses through the oil- 
fever by the fact that a large revenue is added to our State from 
the continued production of oil, we should be no less reconciled 
to the losses our fathers sustained when we contemplate this ex- 
tensive and growing industry among us. But the presence of these 
silk-mills furnishes a reason for our return to silk-culture that did 
not exist in 1842 — for they have all sprung into existence since 
that date. These furnish a ready market for all the silk that can 
be produced. We have seen that the Lowell daughter preferred 
the ready money from the mill to the uncertain barter of her silk 
for store-goods. But with ready money for her silk she would have 
preferred the safety and the comforts of home, with the control of 
her own time and work, to the advantages presented by the mills. 
Now we have the mills. The Lowell lady has returned to her 
home. Her need for ready money is no less than formerly ; and 
if she had the trees at hand she would doubtless raise the worms, 
reel the silk and make her $50 to $500 as before. This domestic, 
home industry, may be renewed. Although the spinning wheel 
is a thing of the past, and will remain in its gilded splendour over 
the linen store (for it cannot be restored in the face of the steam- 
mill), yet the reel may take its place, and be once more found in 
the American* home, as formerly in the New England home of the 
sturdy New England farmer. 

The times are propitious for the restoration of this culture. 
Money is abundant and is seeking investment. No one seems to 
know what sort of investment is safe and at the same time profit- 
able ; for every kind of business disappoints the enterprise of the 
most careful and most far-seeing. A new industry that will em- 
ploy hands that are not willingly idle, and will direct the atten- 
tion of capitalists into a new channel, is the need of the hour. If 
set in motion, it will unlock the wheels of trade, open the channels 
of business and start anew the stagnant inter-societary circulation. 
But this new industry must not be suffered to run into the reckless 
speculation of 1840. At that time the raising of silk was but a 
pretext ; the rapid accummulation of money by a fortunate sale of 
trees was the real object of the planter. We have learned much 
since that day with regard to the association of capital, so that 
small risks by many capitalists will not endanger the ruin of any, 



Silk Culture and Home Industry. 1 1 

if immediate success is not achieved. And capital so associated 
can effect what private enterprise cannot accomplish. It can 
regulate. It can distribute by rule. It can adopt a system that 
shall embrace the State. It, when incorporated, can arrange with 
the railroads to plant their station-villages with trees ; or to line 
their embankments or their waste grounds with them ; or to hedge 
in their roads with the mulberry. Such incorporated companies 
would buy village lots, and make the culture of silk the means of 
improving their purchase by the enhanced value of the land. 
They would increase the travel and the freights of the road by the 
increased population they would bring to every station-village so 
improved. The opportunities for legitimate business that would 
be opened by introducing this industry systematically and judici- 
ously are too numerous for mention, and will occur to every one 
who reflects how entirely the value of property depends upon the 
amount and rapidity of the business that is being done. 

An Industrial Silk-school is the form which such investment of 
capital should take. The capital should be large. It should be 
sufficient to purchase land more than enough for the wants of the 
school. It should derive its revenue and its increase from build- 
ing and renting in the immediate vicinity of the school. It should 
build up the village around it ; should buy lots and improve them — 
selling or renting them always with the stipulation that mulberry 
trees be grown and preserved upon the lots. "Silk" should be 
the aim ; not ten, twenty or an hundred per cent, upon the capi- 
tal. The revenue properly belonging to capital, the six per cent, 
that is its due, should be made the means of keeping money in this 
culture, and inducing more to enter it, and thus to extend the in- 
dustry through the State. It would be unreasonable to expect 
that capital would aid this enterprise, unless its own legitimate 
revenue were produced. 

An Industrial Silk-school established at one station-village, 
near the city, would be a beginning from which other like schools 
would branch out. It should foster these, not rival them. It 
should furnish trees, eggs, skilled employees and managers to 
them as they should arise, until from the one such school many 
schools, hundreds of silk schools, shall be found distributed over 
the State ; and every third or fourth station -village should boast 
of the amount and excellence of the silk it could produce. Every 



1 2 Silk Culture and Home Industry. 

such school would be a focus of silk-culture. From it the neigh- 
bors would procure their trees or their eggs, or the cocoons to 
reel. To it they would bring their leaves for sale ; or their eggs 
of choice size ; or their silk, the reeling of which had employed 
their winter evenings. Each school would gather up the silk pro- 
duct of its neighborhood for sale to the mills that are now near at 
hand, as they were not in 1840 — to the mills of Philadelphia, or 
of Paterson, of Baltimore, New York, or elsewhere within reach. 

The picture of silk culture that it is purposed here to present is 
not that of 1840. Then whole fields were covered with the broad- 
leaved multicaulis plants. Wheat, corn, potatoes, fruits, and every 
other remunerative crop was displaced, that the inedible switches 
might be grown. It was not at the towns and villages, but over 
all the farming land that they were spread. The failure to sell 
them lost his whole year's crop to the farmer, and to some farm- 
ers the year's product of all their land. At that time individuals, 
putting all their capital into the experiment, sought to make not 
only a living, but a rapid and large fortune out of the profits of 
silk culture ; and they failed from want of support outside of their 
own means, and from the absence of that routine in trade which 
only time and use can establish ; from the absence also of ready 
cash sales at a home market — for all the silk was then exported. 

The picture that we aim here to draw is that of a wide distribu- 
tion of silk culture. We would picture the village whose streets 
are shaded by mulberry trees, whose yards have one or more at 
every dwelling, in whose suburbs the fences are supplied by the 
intertwined branches of the multicaulis, and whose neighboring 
farmers bring leaves and branches from the mulberry hedge to the 
daily market at the industrial school. We see in imagination many 
such villages over all the State — hundreds of them — wherever the 
railroad has extended, or shall hereafter extend its conveniences 
of travel and of freight. We fancy many families engaged in the 
culture ; the trees near at hand, or the leaves being easily pro- 
cured, many a young girl, or elderly lady, or feeble, sickly man, 
will turn to this culture for amusement or for profit. " The ten, 
twenty, fifty, or an hundred pounds," that Mr. Cobb found "a 
family makes in a season," in Connecticut in 1828, will yield its 
$50 to $500 to the Pennsylvania family of the future. We see in 
imagination these family products flowing to the industrial school ; 



Silk Culture and Home Industry. 1 3 

and from the many industrial schools to the chief silk school ; and 
from it sold to the city mills; while the return flow of ready 
money from the mills carries wealth and prosperity to every silk 
village in the State. Nor is this picture a vain one. It can be 
made a fact. There is abundant testimony to show that the silk 
produced in Pennsylvania, in the neighborhood of Lancaster and 
Carlisle, was silk of the best kind — the very best, making " a 
stronger thread than the foreign silk," and " by many of the 
manufacturers it was altogether preferred" (census of 1861, 
p. c. 1). The number of villages around the railroad stations is in- 
creasing year by year, but they are already numerous enough to raise 
the one million sixty three thousand eight hundred (1,063,809) 
pounds of raw silk that was imported into the country in 1872, 
at a cost to the country of five million six hundred and twenty- 
five thousand six hundred and twenty ($5,625,620) dollars ! 
Five to six millions of the hard earnings of men sent to the Chi- 
nese or to Japan, for a material which the feeble hands of women 
and children could have as readily produced in our own State- 
Pennsylvania alone can raise all the silk that the present mills of 
the country require ! Pennsylvania can add five millions of money 
to her effective annual resources, by utilizing the now useless mul- 
berry tree ! 

The names that have been associated with silk culture are hon- 
ored names — Colbert, Olivier de Serres, both ministers at the 
Court of France ; Count Dandolo, whose careful labors trebled 
the product of the French silk provinces ; Henry and Francis, 
kings of France, who both fostered and encouraged its growth ; 
King James I., of England, who, fulminating his harmless thun- 
ders against tobacco, sought earnestly to introduce silk growth 
into all his dominions. Dr. Franklin exerted himself to intro- 
duce it into Pennsylvania, long before Mr. Du Ponceau gave 
a helping hand to Mons. D. Homergue, to whose example and 
writings the efforts in 1830-40 were due. Who now will claim 
the honor of adding this rich industry, this wealth-producing 
staple, this $5,000,000 annual (gold dollar) product, to the reven- 
ues of Pennsylvania ? Is there not one who will aid in setting 
this beautiful branch of skilled labor at work? Is it not the part 
of the Social Science Association to examine into and commend 
the effort to set so many Pennsylvania families at this highly re- 
munerative culture ? 

Saml. Chamberlaine, M. D., 

Bryn Mawr, Montgomery county, Pa. 



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